cliff and really hurts almost every american family in our country, in our economy, as a whole. this shouldn't be a surprise to us. it's not as if, if i could use the metaphor, that congress was going along in a bus and -- on a ride through the country and suddenly came to the end of the road and there was a cliff. this shouldn't be a surprise to us. we -- we -- we created this cliff ourselves a year and a half ago when we adopted the budget control act. and we created it for a very good reason: because we knew that we had proven ourselves incapable of making the compromises that were necessary to achieve the long-term bipartisan debt-reduction program that america desperately needs. we're over $16.4 trillion in debt. i'm in my last days as a u.s. senator. if you'd told me when i started that we'd be $16 trillion in debt, i wouldn't have believed it. frankly, if you told me just a dozen years ago at the end of the clinton administration when we were in surplus that we could possibly be $16 trillion in de debt, i would have thought -- well, i would have thought you were not reali